[mythtv-users] Which Distro?

[Jarod Wilson]

We're getting a bit OT, and I promise to stop after this one (or take it 
off-list :-).

On Thursday 07 April 2005 20:03, gLaNDix (Jesse Kaufman) wrote:
> Jarod Wilson wrote:
> > Now for my own brief rant: folks claims that FC is somehow so much slower
> > than another distro are flawed. The difference is that FC starts with an
> > everything approach, so you have to trim, while others start with a
> > nothing approach, so you add only what you want. Most of my RH/FC
> > installs start with a minimal install, then add from there... I've run
> > every major distro out there, and nothing is faster than anything else by
> > any significant margin when tuned for the same job. Anywho... :-)
>
> can't speak for FC2 or FC3, but FC1 definitely was *much* slower than
> slackware with the same packages and same versions (or as close as the
> distros each could get) ...

Haven't touched slack or FC1 in a while myself, but FC3 is right on par with 
Gentoo in my experience, when configured for the same job on the same 
hardware. This holds especially true for server functions. There are some 
small increases in desktop performance, but none that were enough to make me 
want to stick with it and live through endless compiling when I want 
something new installed (yes, I know there are binary packages, but then why 
not just use an RPM- or deb-based distro?).

Part of it may be that I refuse to use anything slow enough where optimizing 
the living hell out of bash provides a significant percentage increase in 
performance (I'm being facetious about bash, of course). Same reason I 
stopped overclocking systems years ago. It was neat when I could get a 50% 
speed boost, but now I run a system that actually dynamically *underclocks* 
the cpu to save heat and energy, and because it just doesn't need to be that 
fast when you're typing an email. (Athlon 64 3500+, 2.2GHz peak clock, 
dynamically scales down to 1GHz).

> > I don't have a single RH box (work or home) with sendmail installed, no
> > use of --force or --nodeps anywhere and no broken deps.
>
> ok, maybe sendmail's a bad example ... but i have *very* few things
> installed on a FreeBSD box running two websites with mysql, php,
> postfix, courier imap, etc ... a similar server setup with redhat would
> have at least 2x the amount of packages (taking into consideration that
> FreeBSD has some of the core "packages" as part of the OS itself, not as
> separate packages) ... and not one of them has GTK or Qt installed
> (those, especially GTK were the hardest to rid myself of on RH boxes)

Wha...? What kind of dedicated server install has any gtk or qt packages at 
all? (aside from a dedicated mythbackend, which does need some qt stuff). I 
have umpteen boxes at work without a hint of gtk or qt.

True, you get extra gunk if you use Red Hat's rookie-friendly "Server Install" 
option, which gives you all these Gnome gui-based system-config-* utilities, 
but any seasoned RH vet should be doing custom installs, preferrably via 
kickstarts, with which you can get pretty damned minimal.

Note that Red Hat is either number one or two in terms of market-share for 
embedded use (if they're two, they've been passed by "build your own"), so 
its obviously very possible to get an extremely tiny install footprint.

-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod at wilsonet.com

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